Did the island matter? And other possible plot holes
The question percolating at the back of my mind all season was, if the island is so important to, you know, the world not ending, why do things seems so great during the flash-sideways? I kept expecting the smoke monster to appear in LA and wreck things up. …

I find that really convincing, Alison Janney is Not a Ninja. The discovery of the corpse of the Man in Black does seem to mean that the figure we saw talking to Jacob and Richard was just the smoke monster taking his form, the exact same way that it used Locke's corpse to take his form now. Why stay in his form? I…

The fact that Luke got stuck in the dog crate was predictable, but the gag that he had to pee but he wasn't going to do it in there — which is almost verbatim the reason dog trainers tell you to crate your dog in the first place — took it to another level.

I will see this movie…
Because it features Craig Robinson, star of Dragon Wars!

Peyo
Peyo's original Smurf comics aren't bad, especially the original Johan et Pirlouit series that gave birth to the Smurf characters . In particular, they're really well drawn. Not that this really says much about the potential of the smurf movie.

I'm still hanging on to the theory that Jacob let himself be killed on purpose. Somehow, his death is going to be part of a long-term strategy to manipulate events on the island to play out the way that he wants them to. Sure, the good guys are scattered now — pretty soon they're going to have to decide, one more…

The writers really seem to be writing for the long-term at this point. They've said before that they expect "Lost" to survive past its airdate as a complete work, and watched back to back I don't think the pacing of these episodes will frustrate anyone (bland dialogue recapping earlier events, like Sayid's ridiculous…

Errol Morris's Blog
If you haven't yet, take the time to read through Errol Morris's blog at the New York Times. His reflections on the relationships between truth and image, reality and representation, are fascinating, and mostly told through endlessly revealing interviews with artists and photographers.

Mad Men is in no way like a soap opera, except that both feature characters who sometimes have affairs. The defining characteristic of the soap opera is that the back and forth of the romantic pairings is the engine that moves the plot forward, and that no relationship can be taken too seriously or last too long…

Don Draper's secret identity is also the key to the way the show talks about advertising: as a culture, a source of meaning, as a surface that's more important than the reality.

zxcvb, you could not be more wrong. Don Draper's secret is the foundation of the show; it is the lens through which everyone else is viewed. Identity is a construction, and lies are more important than truth. It's also a vision of America and the way it changed in the 1960's. Class boundaries have been torn down,…

The people behind Life on Mars must have been thinking about two things when they wrote their series finale: first, that if the ending didn't make sense, or didn't seem to fit with what had come before, people would complain, and second, that the ending had to be something nobody would have predicted. Their ending…

Solomonic Judgments
I thought that what really made this episode pop was the way that Silas's judgments were partly about justice, but also partly about making the King look as clever and wise as possible. This is a really clever adaptation of the Biblical source material, which are themselves propaganda, and…